William Hayden was born into slavery in 1785, at Belle Plain plantation on Stafford County’s Potomac Creek and near the Potomac River. His owner separated William while still a child from his mother. William returned as a free man decades later in an effort to liberate her and perhaps his sister as well.

William Hayden at the time he published his memoir in the 1840’s.

Hayden stands out not only for attempting this prior to the Civil War, without the new paths to liberation that the war would open for other enslaved people, but also for publicly condemning the system that had devastated his family, in a memoir published in 1846. The Narrative of William Hayden…Written by Himselfalso traced the origins of his faith as a Christian.

Looking east along Potomac Creek and then across the Potomac River, from a point near the site of the main plantation house at Belle Plain—the basic elements (modified by reforestation and bank-erosion) of William Hayden’s beloved vista. Lowest shoreline, appearing blue-gray in far distance, is Maryland on opposite side of the Potomac River. Closer, two-level shoreline at left is Crow’s Nest, in Stafford County, Virginia and on opposite side of Potomac Creek from Belle Plain. (In 1864, as shown on the map linked in my text below, Union wharves were situated along the right bank of the creek: one just upstream, to the left of the camera-position here, the remainder downstream.)

Along with written descriptions, the memoir includes wood engravings, or woodcuts. These are stylized and doubtless reflect the imagination of a non-eyewitness engraver to one degree or another. Yet several of the artworks may represent the only pictorial illustrations of enslaved people’s lives in the Fredericksburg area, prepared at the direction of someone who was once held in bondage in the area and who returned to again witness slavery there firsthand.

Narrative of William Hayden opens two years after the end of the American Revolution, with the author’s birth at Belle Plain to Alcy Shelton, a slave of “George Ware,” and James, a slave of “Mr. Daniel.” Judging from background information on the estate, in historian Jerrilynn Eby’s 1997 county history, They Called Stafford Home, William Hayden’s memory over half a century had modified some spellings slightly: Alcy’s owner was actually George Waugh, who shared occupancy of the 1,500-acre Belle Plain plantation with his brother, Robert Waugh. George and Robert’s father, John Waugh, had died in 1783 in possession of at least 39 enslaved people, Alcy Shelton probably among them.

William Hayden’s own father, James (with whom he evidently never lived and whose minimal mention in the Narrative does not even include a last name), was perhaps the property of Travers Daniel, who owned Crow’s Nest plantation on the opposite side of Potomac Creek from Belle Plain.

Since the Belle Plain plantation house survived until the Civil War, this detail from an 1841 plat reflects the basic landscape of Hayden’s childhood decades earlier. The exact location of his mother’s cabin is unknown; it may have been situated, along with other dependency structures, in the area marked “barn” here. The steamboat landing was not present during Hayden’s childhood, but by the 1820’s it was operational and likely the point where he disembarked when returning to the area as a free man. Copy courtesy of the White Oak Museum.

William’s first recorded memory was of savoring the morning scenery from the door of the cabin he shared with his mother, brother, and sister. The cabin afforded views of both Potomac Creek and the Potomac River, occupying a location on or near the main road from Fredericksburg. The plantation’s frontage on Potomac Creek adjoined the sites of a Colonial-era wharf and public warehouse for tobacco shippers, and would gain national fame during the Civil War.

(For my GoogleEarth overlay map of the Federals’ Belle Plain wharf-sites in 1864 click here and scroll down to fifth illustration; for John Hennessy’s account of Charles Dickens’ visit to Belle Plain in 1842 click here.)

The sun and its reflection in Potomac Creek, with the cabin of Hayden’s mother at left. Although this woodcut from Narrative of William Hayden obviously exaggerates the topography of Crow’s Nest plantation across the creek, Civil War soldiers would comment on the steepness of the area’s heavily eroded ravines.

Thinking back to childhood mornings in that cabin doorway in the 1780’s, William Hayden recalled the origins of his faith, and his being struck by the twin heralds of

The Day God as he peered from the chambers of the east, and cast his reflection from the clear bosom of the Potomac, appear[ing] to my infantile mind like two suns–the one in the heavens, and the other in the body of the waters; and every morning, it was my desire, and indeed, my first employment, to repair to the door and witness the rising of the two suns. …witnessing with joy, the beauties of Heaven, and Heaven’s goodness.

Antebellum Virginia had few more attentive and charming chroniclers than George William Bagby, especially when it came to describing natural and historical attributes as mutually enhancing. A reprint of his reminiscences of canal travel beside the James River provided some of the most enjoyable reading of my college years.

George William Bagby. From: Selections from the Miscellaneous Writings of Dr. George W. Bagby 1 (1884).

On the eve of the Civil War, Bagby assumed the editorship of the Richmond-based Southern Literary Messenger. Its issue of April 1861 carried a brief but extraordinary article offering his diagnosis of, and therapy for, one of the ills afflicting Southerners along the eastern seaboard:

Everybody knows that people are like sheep. They follow their leader. Especially is this the case with travellers going North. Whether they go for business or for pleasure, they take the same beaten track, year after year, with the most persistent reverence for monotony. It is surprising that they are never tempted into any of the by-paths and out-of-the-way roads, for variety’s sake, or the “fun of the thing.” During the present year, and perhaps for many years to come, there will be little travelling northward, except by knapsack wearers. But, whenever peace is declared, tourists will be apt to take up their old line of march, and this will continue until the cities of the South present attractions equal to those of Boston, Philadelphia and New York. Sooner or later, Maryland will be in the Southern Republic, and thousands will go to Baltimore, if no further. To these, we respectfully recommend a slight change of programme.

Sure, Bagby acknowledged, war now loomed, and the only northbound tourists would be “knapsack wearers,” perhaps for years. Yet he saw military victory over the Yankees as certain, leaving as a deeper problem the myopic, Yankee-like haste and joylessness that the Richmond-Washington-Baltimore railroad corridor (including its northbound, Aquia-Washington steamboat connector along the Potomac River) imposed upon travelers.

Bagby’s article continued by highlighting Fredericksburg as a point of vital divergence for people headed north:

Don’t go on to Washington by way of Acquia Creek. Stop at Fredericksburg. It is a wonderfu[l] old town, filled with people of the good old Virginia stock…. The unfinished tomb of Mary, The Mother or Washington…and many other curious and ancient sights, are there.

Viewing the unfinished monument to Mary Washington in December 1848. From: Benson J. Lossing, The Pictorial Field-Book of the American Revolution (1851).

In the course of exploring Aquia Landing and vicinity through various blog posts, let’s pause in one of the periods predating the steamboats and railroad. The typical visitor to the public beach there who gazes across Aquia Creek to Brent’s Point in Stafford County is probably unaware they are looking at the tip of a peninsula that hosted the Fredericksburg area’s only known Revolutionary War fighting between organized units.

The shooting part of the Revolution came to Stafford in July 1776, 15 months after Virginia’s Royal Governor, John Murray, 4th Earl of Dunmore, declared his colony in rebellion and a year after he moved the seat of his “government” to a British fleet that would raid up and down the Chesapeake and its tributaries. That these operations included an amphibious attack on the Widewater peninsula—dramatic and much commented-on at the time—has recently begun to reenter common knowledge locally, thanks to the posting of primary accounts on Robert Heges VIIII’s Encyclopedia of Dumfries, Virginia website, around 1997, and the publishing of other primary accounts, together with extended narratives of the Widewater episode, in works such as Jerrilynn Eby’s They Called Stafford Home: The Development of Stafford County, Virginia from 1600 Until 1865 (1997) and Donald G. Shomette’s Maritime Alexandria: the Rise and Fall of an American Entrepôt (2003).

Widewater peninsula at center-right, between Aquia Creek (diagonal center) and Potomac River (far edge). The British landed along the northernmost third of the Potomac shoreline, not far south of where the line of the modern railroad begins curving inland. Site of the Civil War-era railroad terminus at Aquia Landing is the small, white-edged peninsula jutting up from lower right corner.

The following contemporary description, perhaps penned by an officer in the Virginia State Navy and recently made available online by an archive in Illinois, provides an overview of the amphibious operation of 1776. It began with four British warships sailing past on the Potomac on July 22, and continued the next day, when at least one of the four, the 44-gun, two decker HMS Roebuck, returned to dispatch landing craft to William Brent’s Richland. Richland, centered around what was described as an “elegant brick house,” was situated on the Widewater peninsula roughly three-quarters of the way up (northwest along) its Potomac shoreline. Brent owned land in Prince William County as well as in Stafford, and was captain of the Prince William militia: